EPISODES OF THE GREAT WAR [1914

villages in the flats of the Scheldt. Bit by bit the
circle was widened, till Arras was beyond the reach
of the German howitzers, and the inhabitants began
to return to their ruined dwellings. The enemy held
the Vimy Ridge, and his lines lay in a loop round the
city, but he was never fated to enter its streets.

IV

The little city of Ypres, now only the shade of its
former grandeur, stood midway between the smoky
industrial beehive of the Lys and the well-tilled flats
of the Yser. Once it had been the centre of the wool-
trade of Flanders, and its noble Cloth Hall, dating
from the twelfth century, testified to its vanished
mercamtile pre-eminence. No Flemish town could
boast a prouder history.

The town stood on a tiny stream, the Yperl6e, a
tributary of the Yser, which had long ago been
canalized. A single-line railway passed through it
from Eoulers to the main Lille-St. Omer line at
Hazebrouck. An important canal ran from the
Yser in the north to the river Lys at Comines, and
two miles south of the town, at the village of St.
Eloi, turned eastward, bending south again in a
broad angle between Hollebeke and Zandvoorde.
To the east there were considerable patches of forest
between Bixschoote and the Lys valley. A series
of slight ridges rose towards the south and east in a
curve just inside the Belgian frontier from west of
Messines to the neighbourhood of Zonnebeke. For

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